Main Menu

Search form

The 'Nakba' Debunked

The world media are filled with Goebbels-style Big Lies about the “Nakba,” the supposed “catastrophe” and “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs when Israel was created in 1948.

But now an interesting source has come along to debunk this massive campaign of lies and disinformation.

Consider the following citation (emphasis added):

The Arab armies seemingly entered Palestine [in 1948] to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe, as if we were condemned to change places with them. The Arab States succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity.

Ok, current events students, name the source for that quote.

The answer is … (drumroll) … Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), the “president” of the Palestinian Authority, who wrote this in an article in the Beirut magazine Falastin el-Thawra, in March 1976. (Item cited in the weekly column by Ben-Dror Yemini in Maariv, May 27, 2011.)

And that is not the only useful citation from Abu Mazen, also cited in the same column by Yemini. It turns out that last week the very same Abu Mazen had an article in The New York Times in which he claimed to tell his own personal “Nakba” family story. There he asserted that the Jews expelled the Arabs right after the UN’s partition resolution of 1947 (which called for creating two new countries, a Jewish and an Arab state, in the area of the British Mandate). Abu Mazen also wrote that he and his family were expelled (from Safed) to Syria and forced to live there in an old canvass tent.

Well, Ben-Dror Yemini did some homework. The UN resolution, first of all, was in November 1947. The battle for Safed took place in May 1948. Second, Abu Mazen’s family in Safed was very wealthy, with more than enough ready capital to coast along comfortably for quite some time. But most significantly, Abu Mazen’s family went to Jordan, not to Syria. Only much later did they move to Damascus. In addition, Safed Arabs fled in large part in 1948 because they were expecting retaliation for the pogroms they themselves had launched against the Jews of the city in 1929.

And just who is the source for claiming that Abu Mazen was lying through his fangs in that Times piece?

Why, none other than Anu Mazen himself, again. In 2009, he gave an interview to the Palestinian Authority TV channel, telling about his family’s wealth and their move to Jordan.

Furthermore, that same week, left-wing Haaretz quoted one Ismail Fahr a-Din from the Golan Druse village of Majdal Shams claiming he remembered very clearly the Palestinian refugees arriving in that town (back then still under Syrian occupation). Only one itsy bitsy problem, though. Turns out, the “witness” is 57 years old and so, was born 6 years after Israel’s war of Independence.

More generally, I think that any time anyone suggests that we need to empathize with the “Nakba” of the “Palestinians” they should be directed to contemplating East Prussia.

East Prussia, where, in many ways, World War II began (in Hitler’s campaign for Danzig), was emptied out near the end of the war, with hundreds of thousands of Germans fleeing the approaching Red Army and the impending battles, and with hundreds of thousands more evicted after the Soviets pushed through East Prussia into Berlin. In all, 1.8 to 2.2 million East Prussians were driven out or fled. That is 4 times the number of “Palestinian refugees” from 1948-49. Parts of East Prussia were annexed by Russia, the rest being incorporated into Poland.

And what about mourning for their “catastrophe?” No one, not even the worst bleeding-heart in the West, has ever believed East Prussians deserve any sympathy or support or compensation for their “plight.” They were part of the German monstrosity that had launched the war, and they became refugees as a direct result of the crimes and aggressions of the German people, crimes they most enthusiastically endorsed and in which they participated. Exactly like the circumstances under which “Palestinian Arabs” became refugees as a result of launching a genocidal war of aggression and then losing.

Think the “Palestinians” deserve compassion? Not until the East Prussians are granted a “Right of Return.”

Steven Plaut is a native Philadelphian who teaches business finance and economics at the University of Haifa in Israel. He holds a PhD in economics from Princeton. He is author of the David Horowitz Freedom Center booklets about the Hamas and Jewish Enablers of the War against Israel.